 Need from Ancien Régime |
C.P. Weyant participated in Ancien Régime: the pre-revolutionary world in Fall 2018 at Village West.
Christopher Peter Weyant was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1985. He began his studies in illustration at Savannah College of Art and Design in 2004 before moving to Philadelphia to study the traditional techniques of oil painting privately, while attending Temple University the following year. It was during this time that he developed a deep admiration for the European schools of painting—particularly the Italian masters of the late 16th Century. During his travels abroad Weyant developed a fascination with Italian genre painting, which artfully recreated scenes of everyday life.
After graduation, Weyant augmented his education with several years of self-guided study in order to overcome the obstacles inherent in representing the human figure in an ideal manner, while maintaining its essential, visceral realism. It was during this period that Weyant opened his studio, and began to take commissions for portraits. During the course of his first commissioned works, he came to the realization that it was not enough to simply render a likeness, but that the sitter’s head must be “made to think”, which is the sole cause responsible for adding the spark of life to a work of art.
Weyant has also worked with non-profits whose work consisted of working with and tutoring inner city children interested in pursuing further education in the Arts. It was his time there that gave Weyant a strong desire to observe life in urban settings, which provides for so many rich observations in the genre narrative of our own time.
Weyant has a strong preference for focusing on tight compositions where the figure plays the primary role, to impart a sense of simple, yet universally relatable drama to the subject. It is Weyant’s aim in his work to impart a classical ideal with those aspects of life that are seemingly mundane or overlooked, in order to showcase the manifold complexities of people, to give them the dignity they deserve, and to convey the thoughts that prompt our actions.
More information on Weyant and his work can be found at cpweyant.com.